Chicago is a home base of the American mafia, and it seems to have sent a satellite office to run the country from Washington, DC. In major respects, our government has morphed from a guard of our natural liberties into a hierarchical system of cronies that dispenses limited freedoms only in exchange for following its tight-fisted rules.

Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College, has called where we’re headed feudalism. That’s a system of patronage in which the amount of leverage you have depends on your wealth and Rolodex. Another way to look at our country’s situation is by comparing how the Obama administration and its progressive allies operate to the global and American mafia.

The similarities are striking. Let’s consider a few.

Racketeering And Extortion

At the heart of every mafia enterprise is a racketeering operation, in which businesses and private citizens are forced to pay the mafia to protect themselves from harm. Potential harm includes both what The Mob inflicts and that from outside sources, such as gangs or swindlers. Often, a protection racket arises in areas where the rule of law is weak, because in those areas the police and judiciary cannot or will not provide the protection from criminals everyone needs.

The analogies to government should be obvious, but one includes the pervasive feelings among business executives that, if they don’t donate to political campaigns or “nonprofit organizations” run by ex-government officials or other political cronies, their industry or even specific business is likely to wind up on the wrong side of some business-crushing regulation pretty quickly.

The Hobby Lobby case the Supreme Court is about to decide any day now is yet another example of the Obama administration’s demand that people follow its rules or pay crushing extortion fees (preferably both). Both the fines for not complying with Obamacare and the expense of doing so are simply protection money, paid to the administration directly with fines or indirectly through expensive healthcare purchased from Obama campaign donors. The administration doesn’t care about sick people or poor people, just like the mafia doesn’t care about actually protecting people. What both care most about is power.

People Wind Up Mysteriously Dead

The ultimate way to earn power over other people is to threaten not just their livelihood, but also their lives, and the lives of those they love. On that note, perhaps it’s appropriate to mention that the Internal Revenue Service and U.S. Department of Education each have their own SWAT teams. Nary an innocent taxpayer sponsoring this arms race has any idea why their money is buying the nation’s school nanny a strike force, but apparently the Obama administration internally justifies such things. And let’s not forget Bambi Team Six, the crack shots within the Department of Natural Resources who sent a military-style team to execute a fawn some well-meaning American peasants had rescued from a more natural death. When black-helmeted men circle your home, break down your door, throw your children from their sleeping beds onto the dew-ridden lawn, and shoot you 22 times because some meathead mistook your house for a drug dealer’s, it’s clear government has gone from protecting you from threats to becoming a threat itself.

More directly, however, thanks to “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos,” everyone knows that the mafia’s presence means frequent, mysterious deaths. That’s also a hallmark of this administration. Fast and Furious and the Benghazi massacre are the two most obvious examples. It’s been years, in both cases, and it’s still an utter mystery as to why Americans died in foreign lands, where all those guns went, who used what money, where it all came from, and why. That may have something to do with the Justice Department’s utter lack of curiosity about massive crimes being committed on its watch, but remember: where there are mafia, there are corrupt police, district attorneys, and courts.

The mystery isn’t who did it, but proving it. Part of the reason it’s impossible to find evidence to prove what everyone knows is that no one will talk.

No One Talks

The mafia protects itself with codes of silence, both as an expression of machismo-style loyalty and because people who talk end up under a bus. The Obama administration—or its enablers—has apparently gone high-tech with this idea: Who scrubbed Lois Lerner’s email server? It’s utterly ridiculous that in an era where everyone’s naked pictures and address can be found online, two years of what surely are thousands of government employee emails can “go missing.” Let’s not forget, either, Lerner’s fifth-pleading stonewall of Congress, or that every congressional hearing or investigation into any unseemly events is met at every turn with refusals to provide documents, witnesses, or answers.

And where are the classic second-term interviews with “a former high-ranking official within the Obama administration” breaking silence to air dirty laundry, make a few revelations, and settle a few scores? Is everyone afraid of what will happen if he or she exhibits an independent mind (albeit after the fact)?

The Boss ‘Has No Idea’ What’s Going On

Mafia leadership never directly calls the hits. They imply to underlings what they want done, so if the underlings are caught they can’t incriminate the bosses in court. This leadership style is not just the mafia’s. “A Few Good Men” dramatized how it might play out within a Marine unit. The direct analogy, of course, is that President Obama never seems to know what’s happening within his own organization. He had no idea the IRS was targeting conservative groups. He heard on the news about the Veterans Affairs debacle, where vets literally died because the agency managing their healthcare was so corrupt and incompetent, even though in the Senate he had served on the Veterans Affairs Committee and had heard of the problems in 2007. Rush Limbaugh has played a montage of all Obama’s “I’m just hearing about this and I’m so furious” moments: About the Secret Service scandal, the Gulf Oil spill, when people found out Van Jones was a Communist sympathizer…the list never ends.

Either Obama is the world’s best delegator-in-chief, or he knows a lot more than he’s telling us. Nobody will ever be able to prove that, of course.

The mafia answers a need for societal order by imposing criminal order upon the citizenry. In the Obama administration’s case, it first created a need for it to impose order by destroying the rule of law. Sometimes The Mob does that, too. It fails when a few good men resist. The problem with being run by a criminal enterprise, of course, is that it inverts justice and destroys freedom. A murderer is not called to account for his acts unless it displeases the mob boss, regardless of how the family of the murdered feels. Everyone, from business owners to mob associates to children, lives in fear. And, as with every manifestation of injustice, mafia government means that the little people—like you, me, and our neighbors and kids—get hurt the most.

Joy Pullmann is executive editor of The Federalist and author of "The Education Invasion: How Common Core Fights Parents for Control of American Kids," out from Encounter Books in 2017. Get it on Amazon.